How to make your social media strategies simple and easy

Social Media has become a life saving drug for both small scale and large scale businesses. Whether it is a food chain, apparel and accessories outlet, an emerging brand or may be some other small scale business started at home; their ultimate solution to stay connected with their fans 24/7 is “Social Media”. However, many businesses are unsure of how to effectively leverage social media as a part of their marketing efforts.
Instead of navigating the waters blindly, proper social media strategies should be designed and followed. Some tips for a better social media plan are listed below:
1. Determine your marketing goals. Be clear about the specific objectives that you want to achieve. No doubt, we all want more clients and more money, but to do so we need to design proper strategies. Reasonable online marketing goals could include: increase in website traffic, increased customer feedback on social sites, and generating more email options.
2. Determine your ideal client: It’s important to identify exactly what type of people you are targeting and who you want to reach in order to develop a solid plan of action. Be as specific as possible. Consider industry, gender, age, purchase habits , income level, education level, etc.
3. Decide on the message: Once you have established your goals and decided on your audience, it’s time to determine how you plan to reach them. What you say matters a lot. Make the customers feel you’re offering them something valuable and still saving their cost.
4. Determine channels: To reach out at a larger scale determine your channels. Initially determine where is your audience? Let’s say if you are targeting brides you might find that more brides are using Pinterest or watching YouTube videos. You could display DIY boards on Pinterest. You might create short video clips with money saving tips. You could even feature video testimonials of brides who have used your service and saved money.
5. Build and maintain schedule: This is where we get to the nitty-gritty. Create a maintenance calendar of daily, weekly, monthly, and as-needed tasks. Consider things like monitoring the accounts and responding to the audience, continuing to build the audience, and writing the content for the day, week or month.
6. List your current marketing outlets: Review this list and consider what can be integrated to maximize the use of social media. For example, if you use direct mail, you could add the links to your Facebook fan page or Twitter handle? If time or money is a concern, also consider what marketing activities can be shifted or replaced with social media.